Intranet for a Strategy Design Organization

18 May 2021

The Client

The client is a leading Strategy Management organization who provides consulting services to leading business houses in the U.S.

The Need

The client had recently migrated from Exchange On-premises and was new to Microsoft 365 and wanted to engage a consulting firm that can set up the best practices on Microsoft 365 including Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, Security, and Governance. The client had teams who had some experience managing teams but relatively no experience around SharePoint and wanted to set up a proper structure and training plan.

The Challenge

The client saw adoption as a major challenge as most of the product suite was relatively new and given most of the users while understanding and ready to accept the change were not too tech-savvy and needed to build an adoption roadmap. Additionally, the organization needed to get its information architecture to be in compliance with SOC2 and PII to ensure data security for all users along with data monitoring, classification, and threat management.

Strategy

The organization was increasingly looking to use Microsoft Teams for their daily collaboration and conversations and had several 3rd party applications integrated inside of Teams that managed their Projects, Utilization, custom applications, etc. For successful adoption of the intranet, the key underlying point was to define the entire user experience around Microsoft Teams and link up the Teams structure with SharePoint Online.

Organizations primarily wanted to have a base intranet for everyone to use. Hence, there was an Org-wide intranet that was designed with a modern touch including a few custom web parts to enhance the look and feel, custom web part to search people in the organization as a directory, setup Yammer community and integrations, social media setup with custom branding that elevated the end-user experience on using SharePoint. The site had an optimal layout of the content that was easy to find. This site also targeted content delivery based on the targeted audience and the entire organization.

The other sites were created specifically for the purpose of onboarding new employees, HR process management site, and training the new joiners. Training sites were created specifically to the nature of the role to get the employee up to speed quickly even when working remotely.

The primary intranet site was used for making organization announcements during the ongoing pandemic and remote working, setup targeted announcements, update internal news and blogs. The whole site experience had a few custom SPFX developments such as People Directory, Time tracking application and was integrated within Microsoft Teams for a unified end-user experience.

Results

• Increased engagement for end-users and increased adoption
• SharePoint deployment, customization, and branding for effective collaboration amongst different stakeholders while ensuring proper security measures
• The client was able to focus on the content and not too much on Technology
• The intranet site for training and onboarding made the entire process for new joiners quite easy.
• Structured security that offered need-to-know basis rights.
• Well defined structure for accessing all company-related info, find contacts within the organization using the custom web part
• Manage time entries for different projects into SharePoint right from Teams.

Technology Stack

• Microsoft 365
• SharePoint Online
• SPFX, Angular
• Power Automate and PowerApps
• Teams

Looking to build a custom Office 365 intranet at your organization, reach out to us to have tailor-made custom solutions build to fit your needs.